


Atlas Obscura

by avocadomoon



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:02:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28121337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avocadomoon/pseuds/avocadomoon
Summary: The poinsettia had been the only plant in the flat that Dani had taken care of herself - she was notoriously nervous about killing Jamie's "babies," as she referred to them - and so, in Jamie's mind, now that Dani was dead, the flower should be dead too. With no one to water it, surely it would give up the ghost eventually.But it didn't. Jamie never watered it, or trimmed back its newer growth, or moved it away from the drafty window when it got too cold outside. For months - and years, eventually - the damned flower just kept on living, somehow. Just like Jamie.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie, Jamie & Owen Sharma
Comments: 12
Kudos: 44
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Atlas Obscura

**Author's Note:**

  * For [julianbashir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/julianbashir/gifts).



> Be advised, in this story, Jamie contemplates suicide at one point (in a fairly abstract way), so if that's something that bothers you - take care of yourself!

There were entire weeks after Dani's death that were lost to mindless grief, entire stretches of days that Jamie could barely bring herself to get out of bed, let alone leave the flat or face other living, breathing people. She left the shop to the mercies of her assistant manager - a very responsible graduate student at the Sorbonne who thankfully had a gay brother and therefore understood the need for discretion, when their older customers asked after Jamie's absence. She bought ready-made meals at the corner shop and subsisted entirely on crisps and tinned cans of cold vegetables, which she ate standing up in the kitchen. She used the half-bath in the hallway, instead of the master bath they'd shared with the bathtub, and stuffed towels in the crack so she couldn't see the light of the sunlight creeping into the bedroom beneath the door. She covered up all the mirrors, driven by a weird impulse she couldn't explain, and couldn't explain why, even to herself.

Her plants didn't die, somehow, which was another thing Jamie couldn't explain, given that she barely paid attention to them. Some mornings Jamie would lay in bed and stare at the poinsettia that hung from their ceiling - her ceiling - the ceiling - a gift from one of the mothers of the students Dani tutored - resenting the color, resenting the memory, wanting it to disappear but not having the energy to climb up and rip the pot down. It had been the only plant in the flat that Dani had taken care of herself - she was notoriously nervous about killing Jamie's "babies," as she referred to them - and so, in Jamie's mind, now that Dani was dead, the flower should be dead too. With no one to water it, surely it would give up the ghost eventually.

But it didn't. Jamie never watered it, or trimmed back its newer growth, or moved it away from the drafty window when it got too cold outside. For months - and years, eventually - the damned flower just kept on living, somehow. Just like Jamie.

In November of 2001, not quite a year after Dani's death, Jamie sat down to buy her flight to central Ohio for the Thanksgiving trip she had planned to visit Judy O'Mara, and on impulse, found herself buying a ticket to Norway instead. She had no idea what she was doing, or even where she was planning to go, even as she was booking the ticket itself. The lady on the phone had to ask her three times for her credit card number, because Jamie was staring at her wavering, barely-there reflection in the half-full coffee cup next to her elbow, thinking about how badly she wanted to not be awake.

"Norway?" Owen asked mildly. He was stopping in on a regular basis in those days, visibly paranoid about Jamie's mental health. It was funny in a way that wasn't funny at all - how he poked around the kitchen, checking to see how much booze she'd drank that week, the not-so-subtle checks of the skin on her wrists, the horribly sad/angry/frustrated look on his face when he asked her if she'd gone to work that day. "I went to Oslo once. Just a weekend trip with the lads. Don't remember much, outside the bars anyway." He made a face, a sad shadow of his normal cheerfulness. "In my misspent youth."

"I'm flying in there," Jamie told him, "but I'm not staying. I'm going further north."

"The mountains?" Owen asked, delicately. Jamie could almost see him picturing her throwing herself off the top of a snowy Norwegian peak.

"The Northern Lights," Jamie said, having decided it in the split second before she said it. "Always wanted to see them. And well, got nothing else to do now, do I?"

Owen's face drew together sadly, but he didn't say anything. There was nothing to say, most of the time. Hannah had been dead for over a decade, and now Dani was gone too. There was already some gray crawling across Owen's sideburns, dripping down in streaks in his beard. In their monthly letters from Henry, he'd included photographs of Flora and Miles, two unrecognizable, smiling young adults. Miles had a terrible haircut that made him look like a ponce. Flora was apparently getting very serious about tennis.

"I'll check in on your shop while you're gone," Owen said. "If you like."

Jamie shrugged. "If _you_ like," she said. "Not like it's mine anymore."

"You're really done with it, eh?"

"Really," Jamie said. She felt very little attachment to the shop, but more to the flat, which had been the last place she'd seen Dani alive. But even that felt boxy and strange at times, with the eerily-surviving plants and the strange dreams that haunted her there. Whispers she could almost hear, in the quiet moments, words that seemed half-formed and yet still very familiar. "Don't think I'll be back for awhile, actually. I'd rather you check in here, if you don't mind."

"Are you asking me to water your plants?" Owen said, a bit wryly. (Fine, so she was a little possessive. Or she used to be.)

"Nah. They'll be fine. Just pop your head in every few weeks, make sure nobody's robbed the place, yeah?"

Owen cast a skeptical look at the greenery in the kitchen, which looked poised to take over the room entirely. Left unattended and untrimmed, the vines seemed to be planning a takeover attempt. "They...don't need water? At all? I was under the impression that was sort of required, for living things."

 _They ain't living,_ Jamie almost said, but the words jammed up at the top of her throat, just in time. She didn't know why she thought that. She didn't think that. Obviously it wasn't true; everything was as green and lively as ever. The entire kitchen smelled like fresh soil, just the same as it had when Dani was alive.

"They'll be fine," she said again, slowly, and Owen frowned at her like he knew what she was thinking, and didn't like it. "Say, what side of the road do they drive on in Norway?"

Owen sighed. "The right," he said. "Are you really going to rent a car? Surely they have trains and things."

Jamie shrugged. "I like being able to control when I leave a place," she said.

Jamie had a good chunk of money from the sale of her flower shop to spend, and very little plans for her future (or much comprehension of the meaning of time at all, at the moment) so she splurged on a nice car and a private cabin that the booking agent told her Harrison Ford had stayed in once.

"He had a _girl_ with him," the lady informed Jamie. " _Not_ his wife." This was, apparently, a local urban legend in Tromsø. By her sixth day there, Jamie had been told four different versions of it by six different people.

It was a pretty big city, eclectic in the way a lot of Western European cities were; old and new mixed with fake old and tacky new. Wooden houses from the 1800s, on the same block as neon-colored titty bars built in 1993. Dani had never gotten over that - the history thing. Living in Paris had only made it worse. Their first flat together had been in the 19th arrondissement, a building that dated to the 30's - at _best_ \- but Dani about lost her mind about the old-fashioned steel cage elevator. _It's like a movie!_ She made Jamie take it over the stairs every fucking time. They were late to open the shop at least half a dozen times because of it.

Jamie kept expecting it to get old for her, but it never did. Life was always so exciting with Dani. Even the boring things had some shine, when seeing them through Dani's eyes. It hurt to think about, now.

She stayed for six weeks, running out her money, lacking any better ideas. The Lights showed up intermittently - apparently the weather was bad that season - and Jamie was caught by surprise each time. She used up four or five disposable cameras taking photos for Owen, trying to capture the little wisps of color, and mailed them back to him in France in a cardboard box, not bothering to get them developed. She wasn't sure she wanted to know how shitty her pictures were.

The clerk at the post office told her, in a mixture of heavily-accented English and random phrases in French that they finally found some common ground on, that it was much better to see the Lights in Sweden.

"Ah," Jamie said, "didn't know that."

Not many people did, he explained. Tourists. Couldn't blame her. Jamie tried to tip him in cash in exchange for the advice and he flapped his hand at her, looking appalled.

She had to make a decision, eventually. She took long walks at night in the cold, crunching through city snow in her gardening boots, squinting up at the sky and trying to look for bits of color, among the city lights. Did she really come all the way here just to kill herself? Owen surely thought so. He called her every other day, religiously, with a note of panic in his voice. _Still alive?_ he asked sometimes, and Jamie knew he meant the question earnestly.

Did she want to die? Jamie decided to think about it. She walked over a very long bridge, which apparently led to another island, which then led her to a mountain she could hike, which felt appropriate. Mount Fløya. It sounded like an ice cream flavor.

This deep into winter, there were very few tourists. Too cold. Jamie found herself a nice spot and sat down on the frozen ground and asked herself some questions: _what shall I do now? If I die, will anyone care? Will my brothers even notice? Will Owen lose it completely? Will I see Dani again, in heaven? Do I even believe in heaven?_

Maybe, maybe not. In her darker moments Jamie thought that there was no heaven or hell, just this place, this world with its weird mysteries and strange, inexplicable energies that reached up out of the haunted ground to trap you. She knew there was life after death - she'd seen it. Some kind of life, anyway. She didn't want to picture Dani like that - walking in invisible circles, repeating the worst moments of her life, over and over again in an empty manor in the south of England.

Other days, she wondered if maybe she was the one who died. Maybe this was her afterlife: treading through muddy water days with her arms outstretched for someone she couldn't touch anymore, and never would again. Did she want to live like this? Did she want to _get used_ to this?

She sat there until she felt frozen herself, thinking about it. She could almost feel the ice moving up her legs, frost working its delicate way beneath the cuffs of her jeans, spreading out in snowflake patterns on her skin. Jamie pictured her face melting away into snow, pictured herself lying down and letting her body melt into the cold dirt, her face turned up, her hair floating all around her head like Dani's. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw it. Her open eyes, her pink sweater, soggy with mud. Jamie had nightmares of grey, rotting hands clamped around Dani's delicate ankles, anchoring her to the bottom of the lake. She always reached Dani, in the dreams. She'd get there just in time, when she was still breathing, she'd just barely manage to wrap her hands around Dani's wrists, but then the hands would appear and drag them both down.

On the not-so-terrible nights, Jamie woke up before the end of the scene. On the just-straight-fucking-awful nights, though, Dani would push Jamie away, and let herself be dragged back down into the silt. _Get away from me,_ she would say, somehow making the words sound like a scream, even underwater. _Get the hell out of here. I mean it. Go back up there and breathe, goddamn you._

Breathe, because I love you. Jamie knew it's what she would've said anyway, even if she _had_ gotten there in time. She'd been telling Jamie that for years. _Don't follow me. Because I love you._

So no, she didn't want to die. Jamie sat there until dusk, until her arse was practically frozen to the ground, hunched over and shivering, aching with pain. Her tears froze on her cheeks as soon as she shed them. It was the first time she'd cried, since that horrible night at Bly, shaking with sobs in the back of a paramedic van, barely able to even tell the cops her name. She made loud, agonized sounds, horrible moans of pain that would forever stay between her and the mountain. Nobody came. Nobody was there to listen. Jamie stayed there for hours, grieving, with her face pressed to the dead, silent ground, and for the first time in almost a year, she felt like she was still alive.

She went to Sweden next. Owen wired her some money so Jamie flew to Stockholm and took a train to a tiny little barely-there village called Abisko and paid a guy she met in a bar several hundred Euro for his broken down camper van, which is where she slept for the three weeks she spent watching the Northern Lights like a woman possessed. They were so bright, and clear, and wonderful. Jamie took photos and mailed the cameras back at the tiny post office in the village. She tried to sketch them with colored pencils, the results of which were very embarrassing. She cried watching them almost every night, feeling like a lamp that had just been unplugged, a drain that had been unclogged. Dani would have loved them. She would have been absolutely _breathless_ with wonder.

She made some cash under the table fixing up a busted irrigation system at what she thought was an office building, but later learned was just some rich person's house (her French was useless there, her English even worse than useless) which got her enough for a plane ticket somewhere. She still didn't know where exactly she was headed until she sat down at the desk in a travel agent's office and caught sight of a poster of that fancy opera house in Australia, the one that looked like white wings. After some back-and-forth translation with the agent on a yellow steno pad, Jamie figured out that she didn't have enough money for a ticket to Sydney, so she shrugged, and bought one to St. Petersburg instead.

"So you're not coming home," Owen asked, more of a statement than a question, when she finally found a hostel that didn't look like a murder capital and had a working pay phone. "Not yet, anyway."

"Not yet," Jamie agreed. She liked Russian a far sight more than Swedish; the consonants felt rounded and pleasant in her mouth, sort of like hard shell candy. She'd fallen in with a group of Erasmus students who seemed to think Jamie was closer to their age than their parents's (flattering, she'd admit) and they were all very loud and fun and careless, which was how Jamie felt too at the moment, so it was working out very well. They were supposed to drive out to Shlisselburg tomorrow. "How were the pictures?"

"Marvelous," Owen said. "Really captured the many-faceted angles of your right thumb."

Jamie held it up in front of her face, squinting one eye shut so that the pad of her thumb covered up the sun, just beginning to sink below the horizon outside of her window. Her dad used to do that. He told her brothers it was made of cheese ("that's the _moon,_ Dad,") and that every night when he left work, he plucked it out of the sky and kept it in his pocket. "Maybe I should get a real one. Hey - maybe that's how I'll make money now. Take photos of weird things and sell them to magazines."

"I could see you doing that," Owen said seriously, even though she'd been joking. "How are you with money, by the way? I can afford to send you a bit more."

"I'm fine," Jamie lied. The restaurant needed a new oven, and Owen's flatmate had recently bailed on rent, leaving him to cover it until he found a new one. She wasn't going to take any more of his money. "You been checking on the plants?"

"They're terrifying," Owen said. "One of them broke the window in the kitchen."

"No!"

"I'm serious," Owen said. "The vine cracked the glass."

"I'll believe it when I see it," Jamie said, laughing, sure that he was joking, but a week and a half later, she picked up a letter from Owen at a post office in Volgograd that contained a polaroid of her kitchen. Her honeysuckle plant was, apparently, on some plant-version of steroids. It was twice as large as it'd been when she left.

"Do you know what honeysuckle means?" Dani had asked, when Jamie brought the thing home. "Devotion and happiness."

"All flowers mean that, Poppins," Jamie had said. As a professional florist, she'd gotten fairly adept at bullshitting customers on Victorian plant meanings. If she made it sound romantic enough, anyone would believe that the flower their spouse liked most was actually a symbol of undying love in the 1800s.

"No, this one really means that," Dani said, grinning with her tongue caught between her teeth. "I looked it up. In a _book._ A really big one."

"Oh, a _book,_ well then you must be right," Jamie had said, and kissed her scrunched-up nose. She usually was, though - right. Better intuition than Jamie, and far better discipline when it came to looking things up, planning things, making things happen. Jamie never missed her more than when she missed a train or a bus, and had to figure out how to get herself and her duffel bag off an abandoned small town platform and back to civilization again.

She would've loved Russia, too. Lots of big old buildings, and statues with long plaques of boring history. Dani always lingered and read every word, even when it was the most useless information, like the ones at the rest stops in Midwestern America, that went on for ages and ages about how there used to be a trading post on this shitty little pocket of land, and one time a Civil War general may or may not have spent the night there, couldn't be sure really, but didn't this gigantic bronze horse look cool from the interstate? Dani always read them faithfully, and sometimes took pictures. Jamie usually called her a nerd and wandered off to smoke.

She regretted that now. She always thought she treasured every moment, but she was remembering now all the ones she hadn't. Life feels ordinary after a while, even when you know it's precious. She regretted every moment she'd closed her eyes, every blink, every second spent not looking, or listening. She'd regret that forever, probably. Which was no less than what Dani deserved, Jamie thought.

She sold some photos to an artsy magazine at a bar in Belgium, and that girl - cute, too young to be hitting on Jamie as persistently as she had, but Jamie did sort of admire her determination - passed her name onto a bloke at a travel magazine back home, one of those bi-monthly leisure rags that have ads on every single page. The sort of thing you pick up for your granny at the corner newsagent because it has photos of the French countryside in it that she likes to look at on long car rides. Jamie used the last of her food money for the month on a nice camera, sent a series of photographs of the Basilica of the Holy Blood, and got herself enough cash to make it Down Under.

On the Gold Coast, life seemed very light and meaningless; Jamie learned to surf from an elderly Māori woman who took one long, up-and-down look at her and said, " _ouch,_ girl." She let Jamie sleep in the roll-out in her attic and paid her forty bucks a day to help her with her surf lessons, which for Jamie (still very much an amateur) consisted of helping the tourists put their water shoes on correctly.

Over in Wellington, she ran into Viggo Mortensen at a bar on Cuba Street - literally, she spilled a beer on him - and burst out laughing because she was drunk and thinking about how jealous Owen would be. (She wouldn't tell him about that for a decade or so, mostly out of embarrassment but also because she was waiting for his obsessively feral Lord of the Rings phase to end.) She worked a sweet gig doing photos for the All Blacks that got her enough money for another long-haul flight, to Canada this time, with a sort of plan in mind to buy herself a clunker car and drive from one end of the continent to the other. This did not, turns out, end up being a viable idea as the car she found only made it as far as Minnesota before giving up the ghost, but she made Owen laugh to the point of tears when she told the story, so it felt like it was worth the trouble.

"Your plants are still alive," he told her, every time they spoke. She hadn't been back to Paris for almost two years, at that point. The flat was paid for, a guilt gift from Henry when he'd heard about Dani, and Jamie liked the idea that it was there waiting for her when she was ready. She suspected that Owen was paying to keep the lights on, but he dodged the subject whenever she asked. "Terrorizing the neighbors, now. Your little tree - "

"Lemon tree," Jamie said.

" - has grown over onto the neighbor's balcony. Good thing they don't mind. I'm told their kids really like picking the fruit."

She was never sure if he was taking the mickey or not; surely he was, lemon trees didn't do that. Honeysuckle vines weren't strong enough to break windows. It had to be a joke, right? This is what she told herself.

In Christmas of 2004, Jamie finally bit the bullet and drove to Ohio, gathering her cash (and her bullocks - metaphorical) to pay for a long-term rental outside of Akron, so she could see Judy O'Mara and maybe, _maybe,_ Karen Clayton too, if she gave Jamie a cooperative impression on the phone. The first time Jamie had met Dani's mother, the woman cackled loudly and said something crass about Eddie, which had caused Dani to go pale and silent, so furious she was on the verge of tears all through dinner. Needless to say, they didn't exactly fly home every year for the holidays.

Judy O'Mara though, had loved Dani like her own, and proved it when she opened her arms to Jamie too, with a few stumbles here and there, but so much genuine, hopeful care that Dani and Jamie couldn't help but allow themselves to be welcomed. Jamie received letters from her on a fairly regular basis - Owen forwarded them to her, when she was in the same place long enough to receive them - and they were horribly emotional things to read, since they were mostly Judy's fond, sad reminiscences about Dani. She'd been asking Jamie ever since the funeral to visit, and Jamie had only just recently worked up the courage. There were weirder ways to spend Christmas, weren't there? Opening presents with your deceased domestic partner's ex-fiance's mother was admittedly a bit out there, but Jamie had just spent three weeks staying in a group co-op in Montreal, so she was feeling rather unflappable about everything.

Judy had a very large house in a very small, shitty town outside of Akron, and most of her grandchildren lived far away, which made Jamie feel instantly guilty for not coming sooner. Eddie's brothers, a lawyer and a doctor respectively, had moved to the West Coast, and alternated Christmases between Judy and their wives's families, but this was apparently one of the years in which Judy didn't get anybody. Jamie was taken aback by her own good timing, and extremely relieved that she didn't have to explain who she was to a large crowd of confused, almost in-laws.

"You're so skinny," Judy exclaimed when she saw her, and bustled her into the kitchen to stuff her full of jalapeno poppers and something that seemed to be a very confused attempt at bruschetta. Her whole kitchen smelled like basil and warm butter, which reminded her of Owen, which made her heart ache. She hadn't seen him in a few years by then, either. She wondered how his grey hair was getting on.

They hadn't spent _much_ time with Judy when Dani was alive, mostly because Dani felt a deep, very profound sort of guilt for what had happened with Eddie (which she had never, in fact, told Judy the full truth of). But Jamie didn't have that baggage; she knew Edmund O'Mara had been a good man, who had loved Dani, and that he hadn't done anything wrong, but that wasn't her problem. He was gone, and Jamie wasn't. Judy wasn't either - and she so desperately wanted to feed Jamie roast chicken and chat with her by a fireplace, who was Jamie to deny her?

What use was guilt, anyway? Jamie didn't feel guilty about Dani's death. It had been a choice Dani made, in the heat of a terrible moment, but - still a choice. A choice to leave Bly together, to work their way into a life together, to fall in love so deeply that now Jamie couldn't imagine having been with anyone else. And what use was Dani's guilt, to Eddie? Or to Judy? He was dead. Judy wasn't. It all comes out in the wash eventually, Jamie thought. Might as well settle in and have a glass of fucking eggnog.

"It's so exciting," Judy said, flipping through some of the photos Jamie had brought along to show her. She had a semi-regular gig with a travel website by then, plus odd jobs that kept her afloat otherwise. Owen was starting to subtly hint about renting out the Paris flat, but Jamie felt all twisted up about it, so she was ignoring that for the moment. "All the places you've been. Oh, Dani used to talk about the Northern Lights when she was little. She had photos of them taped to her binder for school for years."

Jamie startled a little; she hadn't known that. She couldn't remember Dani ever mentioning it to her. It certainly hadn't come up in the long, meandering conversations they used to have about all the things they wanted to do someday ("when you find that super rare flower and get rich," Dani used to joke). "I thought about her the whole time," she said, firming her jaw so her voice wouldn't crack. Judy looked up and smiled gently, and Jamie thought, _oh, no wonder Dani was so afraid of disappointing her._ "She would've loved it."

"I think she was with you," Judy said, so earnestly it made Jamie want to turn her face away. But for Dani's sake, she didn't. She was learning, very slowly, how to look at things head on. There was no other way to make it through.

She stayed for three days, touched by Judy's hospitality, her manners a bit rough around the edges but good enough for company it seemed. It was nice to do things the traditional way for a change - her last few Christmases had passed without much notice on the sides of roads and train tracks - and it reminded her of her brothers, whom she hadn't seen in years. Since before she went to prison, even. It was strange to think of them as they must be now - Charlie would be almost thirty, and Ned and Tom pushing forty at least. They'd never met Dani - had no idea Dani even existed. Jamie thought about looking them up occasionally - more often when she was around a normal person like Judy - but the effort didn't seem worth whatever meager shadow of affection might still exist between them.

"Don't be a stranger," Judy said, sending her off with leftovers in plastic Tupperware that Jamie was assured she didn't have to go to any trouble to return. "I mean it, honey. Listen to me for a second." Judy was old, elderly at that point, but she reminded Jamie of Hannah at her best: benevolent and beautiful, stern in a playful way, effortlessly stylish with a self-confidence that felt hard-earned. She was wearing a wraparound dress and dangly earrings, her gray hair was pulled back in an elegant twist, and she looked far too cool to be living in the dingy little suburb that she was. "I know it's hard. I lost my husband, not long after Eddie, you know. I get it."

Jamie blinked up at her kind, earnest face, and felt the first pinprick of Dani's guilt. "Judy, Dani and I - it didn't mean she didn't - when it comes to Eddie, uh. What I mean to say, is - "

"It doesn't matter," Judy interrupted, smoothing Jamie's hair back, an absurdly gentle gesture that made Jamie want to shudder and break away. "It doesn't, I promise. I never resented her for moving on, or for being happy again. It's what I wanted for her, and what Eddie would have wanted."

Jamie nearly choked on her words, knowing that that was true, and not true, all at the same time. She didn't know what to say, really. What could she say?

"You can't live forever in the feeling, you know?" Judy said. "It feels like you should. Because you loved them and you don't want to betray them, but that's not the way to honor them. Or their love for you. You have to find a way to live in the world you have now. With the people you have left." She sighed, reaching out for Jamie's hand and giving it a squeeze. "Don't let yourself fall out of step completely, sweetheart. Do what you need to do, by all means, but don't lose yourself either, you know what I mean? You'll regret it one day."

She resented the advice, even though she knew it was true. Jamie wanted to be a better person, the sort of woman who allowed pain to make her wise, but most of the time she just felt like a piece of shit. She didn't want to go back to Paris and face the flat, she didn't want people to look at her. She didn't want to face Owen, who was so desperately worried for her sometimes she could hear him choking back the words over the phone. She wanted, if she were being truthful, to lay her body down in the lake at Bly next to Dani's, and sleep and never wake up. Like Viola had. The thought was too abhorrent, too disrespectful to what Dani had wanted, to say out loud. But it remained, no matter how much time passed, what Jamie wanted.

But Jamie had also been through enough monumental pain in her life that she knew what she felt and thought then would not stay the same, as the years passed. Standing there on Judy O'Mara's porch, Jamie saw the future spool out before her: watching the anniversaries pass year after year, feeling it with the same potency but with a weary sense of resignation, the maturity that came from bearing it for so long. She would live through it, she knew, and she knew she would because she had promised Dani a million times: _of course, Poppins. You know me, I'm always five by five._

"Just keep in touch," Judy said, hugging her one last time. "Not necessarily with me. With anyone who loves you. It helps, believe me."

"I'll try," Jamie promised, and mostly, she meant it.

The flat, in her absence, had taken on a life of its own. Jamie trudged back to Paris in the spring of 2007, resigned to going home for a while, temporarily out of money after her gig at _Food & Wine_ magazine had been reduced to part time subcontractor jobs that only got her as far as the next plane ticket. She was forty-seven years old, greying at her temples, tired of hostels and living out of suitcases. She'd started having dreams about Dani again, dreams like she hadn't had in years - little domestic scenes that made her cry in her sleep, her face wet before she even woke up. Washing dishes with her at the sink, bickering over street directions in the cab of their old truck. She felt, for the first time since she'd left, ready to see the old place again.

The plants were everywhere. Owen had told her, of course. He'd kept an eye on the flat faithfully in all the time Jamie had been gone, poking his head in every couple of weeks, turning the heat on when it got cold, opening the windows to air everything out. She hadn't believed him, honestly - she thought it was one of his jokes. But he wasn't lying - it looked like a fucking jungle.

Jamie wandered around in a hazy sort of shock at the growth, which seemed impossible - vines hung from the ceiling, greenery sprouted everywhere. It was like a scene from a movie - there were flowers growing out of the kitchen faucet, and moss that crept up towards the ceiling down the hallways that had led to their bedroom. The air had a damp, sticky feel - as if she were in a greenhouse - and everywhere she looked, there was green. Water trickled down the sides of the kitchen counter from some sort of large, flowering plant with large, vase-shaped leaves, and the lemon tree had taken over the balcony.

It _was_ impossible. Jamie had left a lot of plants here, but they were house plants - potted flowers and ferns that by all rights, should've died when Jamie first stopped watering them, all those years ago. There were plants there that Jamie had never _seen_ before, let alone planted. Something didn't come from nothing, did it? You didn't get a tropical jungle out of a few potted hydrangeas and a baby lemon tree - right?

"I did try to tell you," Owen said, over dinner at his restaurant. He'd dropped a tray of glasses and shouted out loud when she'd walked in - and promptly announced to his booked-full dining room that his "prodigal sister" had finally returned and everyone would get a free drink on the house that night in her honor. (A bit counterproductive, Jamie thought, but apparently Owen had made a habit of doing this for random occasions, to the point where it had become somewhat of a local neighborhood tradition. Lord knows the French loved their wine.) "I swear I haven't touched them."

"You're sure about that?" Jamie narrowed her eyes at him, to which he responded with a scoff. "Somebody must be having me on. There's no way all of that grew on its own, untouched."

"I didn't even water them, just like you said," Owen swore. He took his glasses off to clean them, fiddling with the frames a little as he wiped them clean with a handkerchief from his pocket. He looked years younger without them.

"Owen, there were dozens of different species in there," Jamie said. "I'm telling you, it's literally impossible! Plants don't just appear out of thin air. You have to actually _plant_ them."

"Maybe the seeds blew in through the window?" Owen guessed weakly. Jamie stared at him, unimpressed. "Well, I don't know what you want me to say. Maybe it is a prank. It wasn't me, if it was. But do you really think it's a prank, Jamie?"

Jamie sighed. No, she didn't. The only person who would have the inclination to play a prank like this was Jacques, the assistant manager who'd looked after the shop before she'd given in and sold it. But he had long moved on; he was working for the World Bank now, had a wife and a little kid, and he always liked the photos she posted occasionally on her Facebook. Who else was there, that would be able to get their hands on so many plants - and why put them all in Jamie's flat, which hadn't been lived in in years?

She didn't like to think about the implications of what had happened at Bly, and to Dani - just because one ghost existed, didn't mean there were more, did it? But of course Jamie had seen plenty of things, as she wandered around the world. A cab driver in New Orleans who had gone into a minor trance when seeing Jamie's face, and then got so spooked at whatever she saw she sped off into the night, backing away from Jamie's money like it was on fire. There was a dead stretch of road in northern Mexico that made you feel dizzy and lost - it'd taken Jamie hours to cross it, since she kept getting turned around in the same little half-mile patch of land - and one very magical sunset she'd witnessed in Alaska, on the top of a small hill in a National Park, that had washed Jamie's face clean of acne and cured the cut on her wrist in a matter of minutes.

Most of it, she still wasn't sure if she believed. She heard stories everywhere she went - a house in Connecticut that made people forget who they were - a town in Maine that sacrificed its children - a certain stretch of mountain road in Colorado that you did _not_ want to break down on - they were all urban legends that people seemed to take a little _too_ seriously, too serious for Jamie to ignore. She'd spent most of the past three years in America, which had more bullshit tall tales than any other country in the world, and half of what people told her were usually attempts to impress her, flirt with her, or both.

She thought, all the time, about what had happened to Hannah. She thought about that more often than she thought about what happened to Dani, honestly. They'd lived with her for months - _months_ of normal days and nights, laughing with her around the dinner table, drinking hot chocolate with her by the fire. The police had told them her body was in such a state of decomposition it would have been impossible to identify her, had Owen not recognized her clothes. _Months, certainly,_ the chief had told Jamie. _At least two or three, if not more._

There was no explaining it. Not in a way that made sense. "What do you think it is?" Jamie asked, leaning on her elbows across the counter. Owen never made her eat in the dining room anymore - too courteous of how skittish she got in crowds - but the corner of the kitchen was just as nice, the chef's table where Owen hosted the mayor of the 8th arrondissement and his mistress on a monthly basis, he'd once confided to her. (Still such a gossip, after all those years.)

"You're not going to like my answer," Owen warned her.

"Tell me anyway."

Owen looked over Jamie's shoulder, at the bustling main center of the kitchen, where an array of cooks were shouting affectionately at each other in French. When he turned back, he looked apprehensive, as if he thought Jamie was going to get angry. "I think it was probably Dani," he finally said, rubbing his beard. "I think...yeah. I think it was Dani."

Jamie found that she couldn't speak, staring down at her wine glass. Her reflection shimmered with the vibrations of the table, jostled by their legs and elbows every time one of them moved.

Owen let her be for a moment, in fragile silence, but after a minute he reached out and took Jamie's hand, firmly enough that Jamie knew he wasn't going to let her pull away. They sat there for a long minute, just existing near each other, holding on for dear life. Jamie blinked away tears and thought, _Hannah would be so proud of him._

"Do you still," Jamie asked, and found she couldn't continue. Owen nodded though, because of course he knew what she was going to say anyway.

"Every day," he said. "And with all my heart."

Jamie squeezed his hand, leaning down far enough until her forehead rested against the folded angle of her arm. She took a deep breath, and laughed to clear the sadness out, which worked only some of the time. "Owen, you sad bastard," she said. "Have you even gotten laid, in the past twenty years?"

"Fuck off," Owen grumbled, flicking the top of her head with two fingers. She laughed again and sprang her head up, feeling dizzy from the wine, and the sadness. She was glad there was no photo of Hannah in the kitchen - even the smiling portrait Owen had in the dining room seemed to have an air of disapproval to it sometimes. "It's none of your business what I do with my manly urges, and I didn't think you'd want to hear about them anyway."

Jamie almost choked. "Manly?" she said incredulously. She pressed her palm against her chest. " _Urges?_ "

Owen smirked at her, and nobly let her have the last word. Not that Owen was ever not noble, anyway. "You know, of course," he said, "that Flora's engaged."

Jamie pressed her lips together, trying not to laugh. "Some poncy footballer. Yeah, I saw the post on Facebook."

"You're the one who's spent all that time over there. You know it's called 'soccer.'"

"Wait, he actually plays soccer?" Jamie asked, surprised.

Owen nodded, grinning a little. "Henry doesn't like him much," he said. "But when has he ever liked one of her boyfriends? Miles gets along with him, though. And she does seem happy."

They'd each received fancy Save the Date cards, expensive cardstock in the grand Wingrave tradition, with Flora's characteristic touch of playfulness - multicolored confetti inside the envelope that had made Jamie curse out loud in the cab of her truck.

"Are you going to go?" Jamie asked.

Owen nodded an assent. "They asked me to make a speech," Owen said. "Since the stroke - Henry doesn't do well, you know. Especially in front of crowds. So Flora asked - it was the sweetest thing - I'm an honorary father of the bride, apparently - "

Jamie beamed at him. "I can't wait to hear it, mate."

"So you're coming?" Owen seemed to bite back his initial reaction, of surprised elation, for something more serious. "They would understand, you know, if you...didn't."

Owen was closer to them than Jamie was, she knew it was true. But Dani would have wanted to go. She would've been over the moon excited, she'd have agonized over the wedding gift and offered to fly out early to help Flora with all the details.

"I don't know how long I can stay," Jamie said cautiously, "but little Flora? All grown up, getting married? Yeah. 'Course I'll come. Couldn't miss it, could I?"

Owen squeezed her hand again. "And you're...staying for a while?" he asked. "In the city? You can stay with me, if the flat is too much," he said hastily. "I have plenty of room."

"No," Jamie said quietly, thinking of that warm, inviting corridor, that led to the bedroom where they'd once slept together. She hadn't had the courage to look earlier, when she'd first gone to look at the flat. She'd simply dumped her bags on the ground and fled, her heart pounding madly against her ribcage. "I have a place. It was ours. I can stay there."

Owen brought her hand to his mouth, kissing the back of it gently. The gesture reminded her of Judy O'Mara - brushing Jamie's hair away like a mother might, even though Jamie was practically a stranger. She'd seen so much kindness, Jamie thought. She really had led such a warm, amazing life so far. Painful, yes - but still amazing.

"I'm glad you're home," Owen said, cupping her hand carefully between both of his and lowering it gently back down to the table. "It hasn't been the same without you."

It never would be the same again, Jamie knew. Their Paris, when Dani was alive, had been everything that Paris could ever hope to be - hopeful, happy, romantic. But that Paris was gone, and now all that was left was Jamie and Owen, two middle-aged widowers, holding hands over a bowl of _cassoulet_. "I'm glad I'm back too," she said. She thought of the jungle-vined flat, and sighed again. "Don't suppose there's any chance you'll beg off early tonight to help me clean up the place? There's dirt fucking everywhere, Owen."

Owen tilted his head back, and laughed. "Not a chance," he said. "In this world, or the next."

"I don't even know if I have a bed," Jamie pondered out loud, tilting her head. "Did I sell my bed, when I left? I don't fucking remember. Everything has to be binned, anyway. I wasn't kidding about the dirt, Owen. Plants are messy."

"I can loan you my sous chef's futon," Owen said cheerfully. "He doesn't know I know, but he sleeps in the office sometimes. Marriage trouble," he stage-whispered.

Jamie smirked at him. "I've slept on worse."

"Yes, your life is much more exciting than mine. You bohemian."

Jamie smiled to herself. She was, for the first time, feeling ready to settle somewhere again. She thought a lot about what Judy O'Mara had said, about not falling out of step with the world. "It's not nearly as fun as it looks," she half-joked.

"That, my dear," Owen said, reaching out to rub his knuckles against her cheek affectionately, "I already knew."

There was a bird nesting in the lemon tree on the balcony. Signs of rodents in the kitchen, and some sort of larger creature had clearly eaten its way through what appeared to be a pumpkin vine ( _pumpkin?!)_ in the living room. Jamie spent three days just getting the bedroom in some sort of shape to be slept in again, and by the time she'd uncovered her bed, she was sure she had twice the amount of grey in her hair as she'd had when she'd started. 

"Yeah, I bet you think this is funny, eh Poppins," Jamie muttered, lugging what must be the twelfth - at _least_ \- bag of rubbish down to the dumpster. "'Oh, I'll pop in and check on the love of my life, no problem! Give her a few plants to look after, won't I?' I swear to God, if I find one more daisy plant in this fucking flat I'm throwing out all your _Little House on the Prairie_ books."

Old and ratty, the box set was on its last legs anyway. Dani had lugged those stupid things (Jamie tried to read them a few times, but the appeal was truly lost on her - bloody boring, really, who the fuck cared so much about candle making?) from flat to flat, city to city, for years. Jamie would never throw it out - of course she wouldn't - but she couldn't bear to look at them every day either, so she pushed them to the back of the bookcase, where they were quickly swallowed up by a friendly little rosemary plant. Truly, Jamie was living in the fucking Garden of Eden. 

She'd avoided Paris for so long because it hurt to think about sleeping in their bed without her, walking past the restaurants and shops they used to love, living surrounded by memories and things that Jamie could no longer have. But she should've known better - trusted Dani a bit more. The flat felt inviting and weird, comfortable and wild at the same time. There was an eerie sort of electricity in the air at times, that made the hair on Jamie's arms rise whenever she looked at her reflection in the mirror. The bathroom in particular was strange; Jamie caught herself losing time as she gazed down at the water, on the verge of some sort of meditative trance, chasing the wisps of color she swore she could almost see: blonde and pink cotton, a hint of rosy-peach skin - wide blue eyes, and the flash of something cloudy white, like the pearl earrings she used to wear to job interviews. It scared Jamie sometimes - how easy it was to sit there forever and watch. She knew Dani wasn't there - floating at the bottom of the tub like a sleeping frog - but Jamie sometimes felt as if she were being looked at, as she looked. Dani - or Viola? It was hard to say what Jamie hoped for more. Both, maybe. She could endure a violent end, if it meant she'd get to be with Dani in the depths of the other side. 

Often, the plants would pull her out of it. A branch would crack, or she'd catch a whiff of something going rotten. Jamie would blink, and remember where she was, and think, _thanks again, Poppins. Nice to have the reminder._

Flora wanted her to be a bridesmaid, but Jamie felt weird enough to be showing up as the strange gay pseudo-aunt, especially since they all knew that Henry's memory was going, so the chances of him recognizing Jamie were pretty slim. (He apparently still asked after Dani on a regular basis, forgetting entirely that she was gone, so Jamie was planning on avoiding him entirely, actually.) Owen was working very hard on his speech, and refused to let Jamie read it. "You better not put anything embarrassing in there," Jamie warned him, to which he replied: "when have I _ever_ embarrassed you, James?"

"My name ain't short for anything," Jamie reminded him. "I'm just Jamie. Like Jackie. Or Frankie. You know this. You've literally seen my birth certificate."

"I was trying to be polite," Owen said archly. "James."

" _Jamie._ "

"I can compromise with 'James-ie.'"

"I really hate you sometimes," Jamie said. 

"I'm so glad you're home," Owen replied, beaming. 

On good days, Jamie was too. She got a gig at _L'Humanité_ editing photo layouts, making decent money. Since she didn't have to pay rent or scrape together money for hotels and train and plane tickets every few months, she was doing more than fine. She was thinking of selling some of the magical plants, if that didn't feel too sacrilegious. Maybe she could use it as a selling point: _fresh gardenias, grown spookily by the silent spirit of my dead lesbian lover! Twenty euro for the small, forty euro for the large._ _Ten euro surcharge for heterosexual customers (straight sales tax)._

The wedding would be in July. Northern California, where Flora and her footballer husband would be settling down to buy a house (well - condo, Jamie had been informed) and starting their life together. Jamie was flying into San Francisco and flying out of Akron - to see Judy - and she didn't really have much of a plan as to how to get from one end to the other, quite yet. Maybe she would hitchhike. Dani used to tell a very funny ghost story about a phantom hitchhiker that always came off more goofy than scary.

Maybe Jamie could clip one of these flowering plants and use it as a wedding gift. Would it survive a plane ride? (Jamie scoffed - as if anything could kill these fucking things.) That would be nice. Dani would probably like that. 

Maybe she would call her brothers, now that she was standing still again. Maybe she'd call Dani's mother. Maybe she'd get a dog, or something. One of those terrible little yappy things that rich women carried around in their arms like babies. Maybe she'd sleep through the night every once in awhile. She hadn't yet, but sometimes she felt hopeful about it. The bad dreams were getting less frequent than the good ones. 

Good days, bad days: it would be like this forever, Jamie knew. At night, she felt closer to happiness - like nightbloom jasmine, Jamie often felt like she was the most alive when nobody else was looking. Or perhaps - when there was only one person looking. A person who wasn't really there at all. (Maybe, maybe not. Did it matter, how real it was? The plants were certainly real. The colors Jamie saw in the water were, too.)

"Did you know," Dani told her once - this was years ago, before they settled in Paris, even - maybe they were still in America? Jamie didn't remember - "that the word 'daisy' comes from the old English word 'day's eye?' It's what they called daisy flowers. Day's eye plants."

"So," Jamie had said skeptically, "daisies are named after...daisies? That's riveting stuff, luv."

Dani stuck her tongue out at her. "It's interesting."

"What does it mean? In flower language?" Jamie grinned. "Wait - everlasting love. Right? All flowers represent everlasting love."

"Innocence," Dani said primly. "Purity. Virginity."

Jamie honked out a loud laugh, tilting her head back against the couch. Dani didn't look over, but her cheeks flushed a delicate pink. 

"In Roman mythology, it represented the nymph Belides," Dani said, reading from her book, "who escaped a god who wanted to seduce her by turning herself into a daisy. Aw, that's...sweet. I guess."

"Oi, there's your symbolism," Jamie said. "Resisting the patriarchy by literally turning yourself into a 'precious flower.'"

Dani wrinkled her nose and ignored her, still focused on her book. "Motherhood and childbirth - snore - oh hey, you'll like this - _sensuality_ \- "

"It's literally the least sexiest flower," Jamie complained. "So boring. _Childish._ All those bloody hair clips and sundresses in Teen Vogue - ugh."

"And in Celtic mythology, it represented grief," Dani continued, flipping a page with her thumb. "The gods sprinkled daisies on the graves of dead children to give their parents hope for new life." Her face sobered. "God. How lovely but also...sad."

Her eyes, split into two different colors, seemed eerie sometimes in the low light; it always used to catch Jamie off guard. She remembered that afternoon that Dani's pupils had been two different sizes. Jamie used to make her keep her eyes open when they made love, watching the difference between the two - the way they would contract and expand at different speeds. It made Dani look a little high all the time - which was frankly pretty cute - but also like half of her was very far away, which was fairly accurate. A terrifying thing, when she was alive. Now that she was dead, Jamie almost missed being so frantically scared all the time. The urgency was gone, but the fear was still there. It spread out and surrounded her, separating her from the rest of the dry, waking world. Nobody else would really understand what it was like, to see what Jamie saw. 

"I'll stick with the nice meanings, thanks," Jamie remembered saying, edging in close to Dani's shoulder on the couch. They'd been wearing matching shoes for some reason. A sale, Jamie remembered vaguely. Dani had her hair cut short - her 'butch phase,' Jamie had called it, to Dani's profound embarrassment - and dangling earrings that always got tangled up in her hair. Jamie used to be forever reaching out to untangle them. (She missed that very much too - the caring. The opportunity to reach out and _help._ )

"I don't know why you make fun of me when your favorite flower is a _pitcher plant,_ " Dani had said. Jamie remembered how she blushed, right before she said: "Jamie, it literally looks like a _dick_."

"That's why I like it, Poppins," Jamie told her. "It's _funny._ "

"If you're a twelve-year-old boy, maybe."

"Maybe I am." Jamie grinned. "Emotionally."

"Won't argue with that," Dani had said. Jamie heard her laugh every time she closed her eyes. Beneath the surface, it sounded different. Sort of younger, but also older, all at the same time. "Maybe we could plant some on the balcony. If you aren't too _picky._ I tried to take good care of them while you were gone, but I gotta admit - I'm relieved that you're back. Not that I resented you leaving, it's just - well, you know how I am with plants. I either kill them in a day, or they turn on me and break the pot! Like the evil plant in _Little Shop of Horrors,_ only - yaknow, nicer. Sorry, I'm rambling, aren't I? I'm just nervous to see you again. Hey - are you with me? You can hear me, right? Jamie?"

"Yeah, Dani," Jamie said, reaching out to touch her face, through the water. "Always."

.

**Author's Note:**

> but a kind of yearning has hold of me—to die  
> and to look upon the dewy lotus banks  
> of Acheron
> 
> sappho fragment 95 as translated by Anne Carson


End file.
